Insights & Foresights: Accident Reconstructions and Damages Overview Animations
Every attorney learns in their first year of law school that to successfully demonstrate negligence – in a car collision, for example – an attorney must establish four elements:
- Duty – the Defendant had a legal duty to operate their vehicle safely and with a reasonable degree of care
- Breach – the Defendant breached their legal duty
- Causation – The Defendant’s actions or inaction caused the Plaintiff’s injury
- Damages – The compensatory value of the Plaintiff’s injury.
In today’s digital-heavy legal system, attorneys increasingly use animated visual aids — litigation visuals — to streamline their ability to convey these four elements. Two of the most common visuals are accident reconstructions and damages overview animations. Without these litigation visuals, attorneys must hope that spoken word and text-based presentations alone are persuasive and memorable enough to sway the opposing counsel, a judge, a mediator, or a jury of laypeople.
“The cost of not doing an accident reconstruction or damages presentation is that it burdens you with having to explain everything, having to connect all the dots. And not only that but making sure the audience believes it and trusts what you’re saying,” says Todd Stewart, a Visual Consultant at DK Global.
Accident Reconstruction Animations So, how do accident reconstruction animations help illustrate liability and negligence? First, proper accident reconstruction animations are not created solely on creative expression. They’re founded on scientific methodologies, including physics, human factors, and biomechanical engineering. At DK Global, we create accident reconstructions using only expert testimony and evidence, such as traffic collision reports and black box data.
Accident reconstruction animations bring the data to life, allowing an audience to visualize the case’s facts. To refine an animated car’s movements, DK Global animators use the driver inputs, such as accelerating, braking, speed, and direction, that are logged in a vehicle’s event data recorder. In addition, this information allows attorneys to connect causation to a Plaintiff's injuries. For example, a traumatic brain injury can occur at roughly 90 to 100 g’s of force, equivalent to striking your head against an object at 20 miles per hour.
Damages Overview Animations
Damages overview animations, on the other hand, visualize the severity of a Plaintiff’s injuries using photos, medical imagery, and records. These visuals are critical because many injuries, such as TBI’s and organ damage, cannot be seen superficially. Moreover, the average personal injury lawsuit typically spans two years. Over that time, many of these damages heal, leaving the plaintiff open to be misperceived as unharmed. That could have a significant impact on the case’s outcome. Yet, without a damages overview animation, the only visuals viewers can rely on are radiology images, such as X-rays and CT scans, which are often difficult to understand without training and medical knowledge.
Safeguarding Your Litigation Visuals
Essentially, when an attorney works with a litigation visuals provider, the latter acts as a “paintbrush” for expert testimony and evidence. Ultimately, keeping in line with Daubert standards, litigation visuals must be accurate and have a probative value that outweighs the risk of unfair prejudice or confusion to be admissible. Optimally, experts authenticate visuals as they develop, so collaborating with a litigation visuals provider early on in the case is extremely valuable.
To summarize, litigation visuals allow attorneys to establish liability and connect damages in one fell swoop. Accident reconstruction animations use real-world data to visualize a case’s facts. Meanwhile, damages overview animations augment photos, medical scans, and records to ensure your audience perceives the case the same way you do. Without visual demonstratives, attorneys must spend more time trying to persuade the opposing counsel using two-dimensional evidence and text, which can be filtered through bias. To discover how DK Global can maximize your verdicts and settlements, contact us today for a personalized consultation with one of our Visual Consultants.
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